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Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
I'm tan, I'm rested, I'm ready. Bring on the 2025 Training Camp and the Cleveland Browns season.
For the last three years, I've taken a break and essentially shut down for a week around July 4th, which is one of the slowest times of the year. The Browns are on vacation, taking a break before the long season ahead. Most fans are dialed out, and even the Watercooler slows down.
This year, my wife, daughter, and I travelled to Sandbridge, Virginia, where my wife's family had rented a beach home. It's on the Atlantic Ocean, but I don't interact with the ocean much. After all, you can't breathe water, which I find disadvantageous to spending time in it. The water itself is full of a bunch of slimy things, some of which would undoubtedly desire to munch on my delicious flesh.
Instead, I sit on the beach, reading or conversing, but mostly watching the ocean waves and Thinking Big Thoughts.
This year, the Big Thoughts were about artificial intelligence, a technology I was proclaimed an expert in using during the 1990s, when the available tools were Tinkertoys compared to the processing power available today. However, the principles remain the same, and I spent some of the week's downtime catching up.
Artificial Intelligence will have a dramatic impact on society and business, and even a small business like the OBR can benefit from it, or hang itself with it. The key is understanding what it can do and what it cannot, what it is and what it isn't. I came out of the experience with some beliefs about how AI can help the news media and how it can hurt, and how the initial applications of it (i.e., writing stories) were hopelessly naive.
Ocean Waves
Peaceful to watch, but full of slimy things (Photo: Unspash.com)
The Browns, meanwhile, did little during my break. The inevitable advent of JimmyWorld and all that entails continued to creep closer, although we had considered it a fait accompli for months here. If anyone was surprised about Haslam forcing the project through, they hadn't been reading the OBR Daily Newswire. Which, of course, means that there was probably some surprise among the mass of humanity.
Seemingly bitter about the inevitable, Cleveland.com once again pulls an editor out of retirement to criticize the development, with its sports staff at a safe distance away and the content locked behind a registration wall. The piece is a paean to political favoritism in the face of unencouraging economic reality, and is (of course) on the mark in its reliance on cold logic.
But logic and unbiased studies aren't of interest when there's a shiny bauble to be had, and the new multi-billion-dollar stadium is the shiniest bauble of all. The gameday experience will be transformed from a fan-generated party to a corporately controlled one, completing the conversion of the Cleveland Browns experience from the joyful Dawg Pound of the 1980s to a sanitized and controlled environment best suited to the well-heeled folks who will be able to afford the new PSLs and ticket prices.
Here's some other news
TONIGHT ON YOUTUBE:
6PM: Browns 3-D
7PM: Joe Tyron-Shoyinka Film Breakdown: OBR GameTape
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Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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